After Hours
by J9
Summary: After a hard day, Rita talks to Tony (Post ep for A Little Dad'll Do Ya, not really romance, but more than friendly overtones)


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Title: After Hours

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Pairing: Tony/Rita

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Rating: PG

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Spoilers: Post ep for _A Little Dad'll Do Ya _(Season 9, Episode 16)

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Summary: After a hard day, Rita needs to talk to Tony.

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Notes: What do you get when you cross an Irish fan who's only seeing season nine now, but is reading the recaps/spoilers for season eleven currently airing, and is alternating between dancing over the possibility of actual Tony/Rita, and shaking with trepidation over rumours of Esai Morales leaving? Answer? This. 

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Tony is fathoms deep in the report for Fraker when he's interrupted by a gentle knocking. He looks up with as stern a countenance as he can muster, because he's nowhere near done, and in his experience, being interrupted by anyone in this house means that he could be tied up for as little as a minute or as much as an hour. His mask of irritation quickly slides though, almost despite himself, when he looks into Rita's pale face. She's leaning against the doorframe as if it's the only thing holding her up, a cup of coffee gripped tightly in her hands. 

"You're still here?" he asks, because a quick scout of the squad room tells him that all the other detectives have left for the day, and after what she's been through, he would have thought that she wouldn't want to hang around either. 

"Yeah. Clean-up," she replies, glancing over her shoulder at her desk, the shelves of files beyond it, now mostly back to where they should be. "You?"

He glances down at the report, tapping his pen against the pad absently. "Incident report," he said. "IAB is making noise about excessive force." 

She makes a noise of disgust. "Did they actually see the squad room?" she asks, and he holds his hands up in mock surrender. 

"You would think," he says. "I guess they're just covering themselves." Though he's pretty sure it goes deeper than that, now is not the time to talk about it. 

"Yeah," she says, and she shifts on her feet slightly, a movement that, however slight, worries Tony. Her next words, "I um… there's something I wanted to talk to you about." 

He throws down his pen, leaning back in his chair and gesturing to the empty seat across from him. "Come on in," he says, and he can't help but notice that she seems to be moving stiffly, no doubt a remnant of being thrown halfway across the squad room earlier. "You feeling ok?" She freezes just before sitting down, and he hastily adds, "After today." 

She smiles, as if she's embarrassed. "I'm fine," she tells him. "A little sore…and my head's killing me…"

"I thought the paramedics gave you something for that," he frowns, and he would have been much happier if she'd actually gone to the hospital to be checked out, but she'd flat out refused. 

"They did," she says, rubbing her forehead with a slight wince. "They've worn off." 

He's reaching for his desk drawer before she's finished speaking. "You want some aspirin?" he asks, opening the lid with a practised hand, handing the open bottle across the table to her. 

Her face lights up initially and she takes the bottle from him with a relieved sigh, but then she tilts her head, looking at him curiously. "You keep aspirin in your office?" she asks, and he smiles. 

"After a week in this place, I figured out that a stash of aspirin was the difference between walking and crawling out of here," he tells her, and a surprised chuckle escapes her lips. "You should've gone to the hospital."

"I'm fine," she says again, but the way she closes her eyes in obvious relief as she swallows her aspirin belies her words. He's about to say something when she continues speaking, her voice altogether more confident, and he realises with a jolt that he hasn't heard her sound like that since the two of them and John Clark were sitting in a bar together and her husband interrupted them. "The ambulance was overkill you know." 

He's pretty sure that she knows he was the one who gave the order, and he could see when the medics arrived, stretcher in hand, that she was mortified. She was sitting up by then, albeit white as a ghost, holding on to a cup of water with one hand, the table with the other, and she'd been talking normally, but she'd still had to put up a fight not to be taken to the hospital, insisting that she was fine, and that what's more she was needed here. He doesn't regret telling John to get an ambulance though, because he can still feel, like a physical blow, the shock he got when he raced out of his office and nearly tripped over her still form lying out cold on the floor. "We didn't know that at the time," he reminds her. "For all we knew, it could've been serious." The fact that it wasn't was nothing more than pure dumb luck and they both knew it, just like he knew that his dreams that night would likely feature a technicolour, stereo sound replay of the full incident. 

She looks down at the coffee cup that's still in her hands, obviously chagrined, and he changes the subject. "So, you said you wanted to talk to me?"

Her head jerks up, eyes wide, and she gives him a tight, nervous grin. "Yeah…" Her voice is quiet, almost breathless, and his eyes narrow ever so slightly. "I've been meaning to for a little while…ever since Don's funeral…" Her voice trails off, stumbling slightly over the last two words, and he takes the chance to leap in. 

"I meant to go," he tells her, which is true, because he worked with her and had worked with Don for years, and in an ideal world, he would have paid his respects. But it wasn't an ideal world, and since half the people at the service would have thought that he was having an affair with the deceased's wife, he'd thought that it might be better if he stayed away. "But something came up…"

At the very least, she should know it's a pathetic excuse, if not an outright lie, but either way, she doesn't call him on it, instead continues as if he'd never spoken. "I… I talked to a friend of mine there…well, she's not really a friend of mine, her husband works with Don, and we'd meet for lunch sometimes, keep one another sane during office parties…" He nodded through her rambling, having a pretty good idea of where she was going with this, but not wanting to jump the gun in case he was wrong. "We hadn't seen one another for a while, and she asked me did I want to meet up for lunch one day…so we did… and she told me that there had been some talk." 

She swallows hard then, and the action seems to take any other words that might have been in her mouth. "Talk?" he prompts her after a long silence, and she looks up at him, pale cheeks flushing red as she leans forward, placing the coffee cup on his desk. 

"About you and me," she says, hands joined on her lap, clenched so tightly that her knuckles are chalk white. "Apparently, Don didn't make any secret of the fact that he thought I was unfaithful, and named you as the other guy."

She's looking at him as if she expects him to be surprised, but he's anything but. She's also waiting for his reaction, so he has to be honest with her. "Yeah," he says slowly. "I heard that."

Her jaw drops, and in any other circumstances, he might get quite a kick out of her almost comical expression of slack-jawed surprise. "You heard?" she asks in amazement. "From who?"

He's quiet for a moment, considering his options. He could lie to her, pretend that someone in Don's office told him. He could pretend that he just assumed that Don would have told other people about the scene in the squad room, repeated to them the slurs he'd thrown around the bar. He could do that, but he opts to tell her the truth - if Don couldn't be honest with her, he, at least, can be. 

Or at least a little bit.

"I had a visit myself," he tells her, and he hopes that she'll leave it at that. 

He knows better though. "From?" she demands, in a tone of voice that he would never have used with his Lieutenant back in the day, but he's not going to cite her for it. They're not exactly talking as boss and sub-ordinate here anyway. 

"Fraker," he says, but she stares blankly at him, not having recognised the name. "He's a new Captain in IAB," he finally tells her, biting the bullet. 

The second he sees her reaction, he regrets his honesty. It's one of pure dismay, as her cry of, "The rat squad?" testifies to. 

"Rita-" He holds a hand out, trying to pacify her, but she's not having any of it. 

"Seriously, the rat squad asked you about that?" Her eyes are wide, and suspiciously shiny. "Son of a bitch…" She lifts a hand to the bridge of her nose, and Tony notes that it's shaking violently. "Son of a bitch…he's still finding ways to screw me over…" He shifts in his seat, never having heard Rita talk like this before, and the movement must catch her attention because she looks at him, instantly contrite. "I didn't mean that like it sounded…" she says, and that's when tears come into her eyes, one of which makes its way down her cheek. He holds her gaze, and that one tear must be the straw that breaks the camel's back, because she ducks her head again, one hand covering her face, and he wouldn't know she was crying were it not for the ever so slight quiver of her shoulders. 

He says where he is, leaning forward in his seat, resting his arms on the desk, joining his hands together. He's walking a fine line, he knows, because he doesn't want to just sit here and do nothing, nor does he want to cross a line and end up embarrassing her. If he knows Rita, he knows she's not going to be happy that she's breaking down like this in his office, though he certainly doesn't blame her. Between what she's been through today, then the stuff with Don and the funeral, he's surprised she's not curled up in a corner of the room, babbling incoherently. 

So he gives her a few minutes to pull herself together, speaking only when her shoulders have stopped shaking. "I don't want you to think that I'm insensitive," he says quietly. "Sitting here like this, while you're upset over there." She moves her hand slightly, looks up at him through her fingers, then moving her hand down slightly to wipe at her eyes. "Normally I'd come over to you…stand a little closer, stuff like that. It's just with the kind of luck we're having today, Fraker or one of his minions would walk in and get hold of the wrong end of the stick." He shrugs as he finishes talking, and his spiel is rewarded, as he hoped it would be, by the smallest of giggles from her. 

Reaching into his pocket, he pulls out a clean handkerchief, holding it up so that she can see it. "I'm gonna come around this desk now," he tells her, standing up. "And I'm gonna give you this handkerchief. Now, I want to make it clear to you, that this is a friendly gesture, and that I am in now way hitting on you, or acting in any way inappropriately…"

By this time, he's standing right beside her, hand with handkerchief extended, and she's smiling up at him, still embarrassed, still red-cheeked, but smiling nonetheless. "Thank you," she murmurs, taking the handkerchief and dabbing at her eyes. "I didn't mean to fall apart like this," she tells him, and he sits down on the edge of his desk, looks down at her. 

"I've had Andy Sipowicz in this office," he says. "You think this is gonna freak me out?"

Bad jokes as they may be, he's still three in a row for eliciting a reaction from her, which gives him heart. "You've had a hell of a day," he reminds her. "A hell of a few weeks." She looks down, shrugging in acknowledgement. "You know, you can take some time off, if you feel you need it." Because she took the bare minimum off after Don died, and he let her, figuring she'd work through things at her own pace. After this though, he's not so sure if it was the best thing for her. 

She seems to be, for she shakes her head, stopping abruptly with a wince of pain. "No, I need to work...keep myself busy," she declares. 

"It's an open-ended thing," he says. "You decide different a couple of months down the line, you just gotta say the word. You know that, right?"

"I know." She closes her eyes, her shoulders rising and falling with a deep breath, then she stands, holding on to the chair until she's got her balance. "I should probably head home," she says. 

"Get a patrol car to take you," he says automatically, because he doesn't want her driving, not the state she's in at the moment. She opens her mouth, obviously planning a protest, and he holds up a hand. "You're tired, you've got a headache and you were knocked out this afternoon," he says, putting on his best Lieutenant-who-must-be-obeyed voice. "You're not getting behind the wheel." 

She grins, her eyes sparkling. "That an order?" she asks, and he remembers hearing that voice back in the bar that night with Clark, before everything went to hell. 

"You want me to make it one?" He matches her tone, and she chuckles softly, shaking her head, rolling her eyes to the ceiling. 

"I'll see you tomorrow," she says, accepting when she's beaten, reaching past him for her coffee cup, walking out of the office and into the coffee room. 

Tony stays where he is for a moment, watching her, then he goes back to the other side of his desk, sitting down, glancing at the half-finished report on his desk. He doesn't go back to it though, not until he sees her standing at her desk, putting her coat on, still wincing as she moves, he notes. When she turns, begins to move, he ducks his head, looking, he hopes, like one who's back working hard, only looking up when he hears her soft call of "Night boss." 

"Night," he says, and she gives him a quick grin before heading for the exit. He follows her progress with his eyes, and only when she's out of sight does he go back to his report. 


End file.
